![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
First of all, are Roysters still around? There's no indication of the above advert line ever having existed and I'm starting to think I just imagined it. And I'm quite looking forward to having meat-flavoured crisps again when I come back to Scotland for Christmas (tickets booked today) - American crisps are very different and come in gigantic bags rather than a large plastic packet with child packets inside them.
You're also in trouble if you go off on that much of a tangent before you even start your point, which is this - after just about a hundred and thirty hours, we have completed Final Fantasy 12. The final boss isn't difficult at all if you've spent any amount of time on the hunting side quest - true, he has three different forms compared to FFX's almost ludicrous anticlimax, but he's nowhere near as difficult as even the low end of the top hunts.
The strangest thing that even after playing it, I'm still not certain if it even had a main character - it's a bit like FF6 in that respect. Apparently they had the characters worked out for a while but switched between who was meant to have the focus, and it shows. Throughout the FF series starting from 7, you had one character that you considered as the "player" and almost always had in your party. However, these characters have got less and less leader-like throughout the series - in FFX the point of the story is that you were clueless about the world you'd suddenly been thrown into along with Tidus. In FFXII, you have Vaan alone in your party for a good portion of the beginning, and he's the one that you control in town areas, but once the plot starts up he never really plays more than a sort of Arthur Dent dragged-along-by-accident role.
The other thing that stands out is the difficulty. Gradually the games have been getting easier over time, with FFX in particular being a bit of a joke. This one isn't as easy as that (you're likely to see the Game Over message in more than two places), and for the most part they've balanced out the lenient way you can swap people in and out of your party at will with enemies to match your abilities. But there are a couple of sticking points. For the optional megabosses (the replacements to the infamous Omega Weapon of FF8 and so on), they've gone for testing not so much your ability as your patience with ridiculous endurance matches against things ranging from eight to fifty million hit points. I didn't bother with the top two of those as I thought by that stage that there were better things I could be doing in the evenings, like catching up with the sleep I lost while fighting all the others.
And to counteract the inflated hit points of the enemies, there's almost too much of a reliance on advantageous spells, after them being almost too underplayed before - in previous games, you had to spend an entire turn for each spell, but in this, you can have them continually cast and ready before you encounter anything. That means that there's no reason not to have them on all the time (Bubble, which doubles your hit points, is particularly vital during the last stages and it feels more something that's a disadvantage when it's off rather than advantageous when it's on).
The ending, though, is as amazing as you'd expect from Square, and genuinely nail-biting at a point where you've spent over a hundred hours with the characters. You genuinely just want it to be over and for them to make it out alive, while there's a tense inappropriately comical air when the token British smeghead Balthier moans about how it's always up to him to save everyone. Although the game wasn't afraid to laugh at itself in several other places - if you talk to one of the people next to the Rabanastre gates quite near the end of the game, he'll start talking to you about all the "spoony bards" coming through. The several days worth of time we spent playing it was definitely worth it even though the series has been going a bit strange.
This is the last post about Final Fantasy 12, I promise. Now on to Resident Evil 4.
You're also in trouble if you go off on that much of a tangent before you even start your point, which is this - after just about a hundred and thirty hours, we have completed Final Fantasy 12. The final boss isn't difficult at all if you've spent any amount of time on the hunting side quest - true, he has three different forms compared to FFX's almost ludicrous anticlimax, but he's nowhere near as difficult as even the low end of the top hunts.
The strangest thing that even after playing it, I'm still not certain if it even had a main character - it's a bit like FF6 in that respect. Apparently they had the characters worked out for a while but switched between who was meant to have the focus, and it shows. Throughout the FF series starting from 7, you had one character that you considered as the "player" and almost always had in your party. However, these characters have got less and less leader-like throughout the series - in FFX the point of the story is that you were clueless about the world you'd suddenly been thrown into along with Tidus. In FFXII, you have Vaan alone in your party for a good portion of the beginning, and he's the one that you control in town areas, but once the plot starts up he never really plays more than a sort of Arthur Dent dragged-along-by-accident role.
The other thing that stands out is the difficulty. Gradually the games have been getting easier over time, with FFX in particular being a bit of a joke. This one isn't as easy as that (you're likely to see the Game Over message in more than two places), and for the most part they've balanced out the lenient way you can swap people in and out of your party at will with enemies to match your abilities. But there are a couple of sticking points. For the optional megabosses (the replacements to the infamous Omega Weapon of FF8 and so on), they've gone for testing not so much your ability as your patience with ridiculous endurance matches against things ranging from eight to fifty million hit points. I didn't bother with the top two of those as I thought by that stage that there were better things I could be doing in the evenings, like catching up with the sleep I lost while fighting all the others.
And to counteract the inflated hit points of the enemies, there's almost too much of a reliance on advantageous spells, after them being almost too underplayed before - in previous games, you had to spend an entire turn for each spell, but in this, you can have them continually cast and ready before you encounter anything. That means that there's no reason not to have them on all the time (Bubble, which doubles your hit points, is particularly vital during the last stages and it feels more something that's a disadvantage when it's off rather than advantageous when it's on).
The ending, though, is as amazing as you'd expect from Square, and genuinely nail-biting at a point where you've spent over a hundred hours with the characters. You genuinely just want it to be over and for them to make it out alive, while there's a tense inappropriately comical air when the token British smeghead Balthier moans about how it's always up to him to save everyone. Although the game wasn't afraid to laugh at itself in several other places - if you talk to one of the people next to the Rabanastre gates quite near the end of the game, he'll start talking to you about all the "spoony bards" coming through. The several days worth of time we spent playing it was definitely worth it even though the series has been going a bit strange.
This is the last post about Final Fantasy 12, I promise. Now on to Resident Evil 4.
